Luxury Driveway & VDOT Apron: Annandale, Fairfax County, VA | Techo-Bloc & Marble

The clients were building a generational home in Annandale, VA, a fully accessible estate designed to accommodate their elderly parents today and eventually be passed down to their children, and Tuck GC built the entrance, driveway and drainage in partnership with Glickman Design Build. We designed and permitted the full 24-foot width, the maximum VDOT's standard private-entrance detail allows without a special exception, and poured a CG-9D concrete apron 24 feet wide with 10-foot radius returns, about 44 feet across at the curb line.

The driveway and the drainage

The apron opens into a triple-wide concrete driveway that parks three cars wide and three deep, framed by a bold 4-row Onyx Black Techo-Bloc border. Because the driveway slopes downhill toward the garage, we installed a heavy-duty ACO channel drain set on a structural concrete footer to intercept sheet flow before it could reach the house. We carried the border, slimmed to a single row, to the front walkway and set Tundra Gray marble on a structural concrete base with the stones pushed tightly together with zero grout joints. The area between the driveway, walkway and stoop was a water trap, so we built an underground dam at the edge of the walkway, regraded away from the foundation, installed a French drain, tied in the downspouts and finished with decorative river rock.

Permits

The apron sits in the VDOT right-of-way, so it ran under a VDOT land use permit with a refundable surety. In our experience these reviews commonly take one to two months, and the disturbed ground around the new apron has to be restored and stabilized with established grass before VDOT signs off and releases the surety. Six months after this entrance was finished, the homeowners called us back to transform the rear of the estate.